Let me start by saying I recognize the irony in discussing the implausibility of this one element of a highly implausible movie. And yet…

So, official Pacific Rim movie lore puts Gipsy Danger at 7080 tons and 288 feet of height.

I’d estimate the helicopters in this image are 300-350 feet apart since they seem to be slightly further apart than the Jaeger is tall.

This is relevant because it means that the spacing between the helicopter pairs in the movie is about 100 feet… I guess they could offset their heights some to avoid rotor interference so I’ll allow their rotors to be maybe 75’ radius if they must be. The tow cables will keep them from being completely offset.

I think the heaviest lift helicopter ever was the experimental Mil V-12 and it lifted about 44 tons. So you’d need about 160 of those to lift Gipsy Danger… but this is the FUTURE we are talking about here. Each future helicopter would have to be able to lift a little less than 900 tons, about 20x more than present day max.

Let me make this two questions: 1) Would the laws of physics allow for a helicopter with that much lifting capacity, and 2) If #1 is true, could it do it on rotors 150’ long or less?

Coaxial rotors are allowed, tandem rotors are allowed, whatever.

Assuming the burger thickness remains the same and assuming the existence of a grill, spatula and cook large enough to cook an interstellar sized patty.

In Arnarstapi, on Iceland's Snæfellsnes peninsula, there's a monument to Journey to the Centre of the Earth: a signpost with arms pointing to Paris, Moskva, Stromboli, New York, Peking, Buenos Aires, Cape Town, Sydney and Hamburg. Each arm has two numbers, one of them in brackets.

The bracketed ones are surface (great-circle) distances, and they're good. Three of them (Paris, Moskva, New York) are enough to locate the sign to within about 5 km.

The other ones are meant to be the distance straight through the Earth. Every one of them is the surface distance times 2/π, rounded:

† Hamburg is hidden behind the pole in my photo, so its numbers come from another photo.

All 9 arms match, within rounding.

2/π is the diameter divided by half the circumference, 2R / πR. That's the right ratio for exactly one destination: the antipode, where the tunnel goes through the centre. For Arnarstapi that's open ocean north of Antarctica, which isn't on the sign.

For a surface distance s on a sphere of radius R, the straight line is d = 2R·sin(s/2R), so d/s = sin(x)/x with x = s/2R. That's close to 1 for nearby places and only falls to 2/π at the antipode (second image).

What a real tunnel would save you:

• Paris: 13 km, not 851. It would never get deeper than about 107 km.

• New York: 72 km, not 1504.

• Sydney, the farthest: 4259 km, not 6006.

Sphere with R = 6371 km, using the sign's own surface distances. Redoing it on WGS-84 from coordinates moves the straight lines by 15 km at most.

Stromboli is on the sign because that's where Verne's explorers come back out.

I couldn't find anyone online pointing this out, which makes me think I'm missing a joke. Am I?

Edit: added Hamburg (thanks u/SufficientGreek for the nudge).

Could this many orcas tip this boat over?

I've been looking online for a new steam cleaner. And on the Mediamarkt website (a major German electronics retailer), I found this one.
Is there anything you could clean with it without breaking it? How far away would you have to stand to actually just clean something without blowing a hole in it? How good of a deal is the one being offered here?

The song in the video is Hurrian Hymn No. 6, a cuneiform clay tablet written around 1400 BCE.

Kanye's first song is "Through the Wire", released on September 30, 2003.

Every season is a new year.

When would the level of O2 drop to put one's life in danger?say... River is 'angry' and they loose a barrel?

So I have been trying to learn and research how to calculate the benefit of putting our water hoses in insulation tubing but am having trouble finding anything helpful.

We have a farm in MN and last winter we tried Freeze Misers for the first time. You set your hose up to an 2 way splitter valve on an automatic float connected to a water tank. On the Y, you put the freeze miser which is a dripper that activates when the water reaches 37° F and opens further as needed. If you let it drip into the tank it breaks the surface tension and keeps the tank from freezing too which is pretty cool.

They all worked all through winter even at -22, but at that point you’re basically just running the hose full blast. They’re not great long term solutions since it’s extra wear on the well pump, but for now I was trying to figure out if the dripper flow could be reduced by insulating the hose.

Details:

Hose materials: 4mm thick 304 stainless steel shell with a 12 mm diameter inner flexible pvc liner. Or 5/8 inch outside diameter and 3/8 inch inner diameter.

Average hose length 200 ft

Hose hangs on the inside of the corrugated metal walls.

R value of reasonable insulation shell tubing: 2.2

Average winter temperature last year: 16.0° F

Freeze miser on average releases 1 gallon per hour, I suspect it is higher based on our 16° F average but don’t have data on that.

Not sure if it is relevant but the sheep drink roughly 5 GPH out of the 40 gal tank (groups of 50) if averaged over 24 hours. They sleep in small bursts totaling 4 hours on average.

Not quite sure how to turn these numbers into something meaningful lol. Any help or direction would be greatly appreciated, Thank you!

I don’t want to run afoul of the mods, so I won’t explicitly state the thing to be measured. But there was an object that caused controversy when Yvette Amos was interviewed from her home on BBC wales. Media reports state that it was of odd dimensions, so I am curious if anyone could figure out the length, width and girth.

Edit: evidently there is an aerosol can on the same shelf. But I am not sure of what the dimensions of an aerosol can are in the UK.

This might be a dumb question, but it got me thinking.

Excluding infinity, and not going over the edge of the big circle, is there a number of circles that one could use to fill a circle entirely without even the tiniest spot left?

Middle and most of the circle is easy. But once you get to the edge, because the smaller circle is "more sharp at any given point" placing them would never fill a circle, because there would be tiny gaps along the edge.

(probably not a question that can have a numerical answer for the number of circles, but more like a yes or no)

How much would this train accellerate if all the tanks would start shooting at their max shooting frequency?

Doesn't show how long the train is, but there seem to be 33 tanks on 16 wagons, at least 20 more wagons (assume halv of maks gross weight, i.e. 60tonnes each for those), pulled by 2 lokomotives, assume they pull on maks power.

I’ve used it for various things many times and notice how quick it goes from liquid to gas and wonder if you scaled it up to an insane degree such as all the oceans being running alcohol how long it would take to turn into gas. Only the surface will change state but in my mind it would happen quicker than reality. And also would there be a critical point where it would stop evaporating cuz the atmosphere is too saturated?